Ivara Complaints [Comprehensive]

[YagoXiten]

Opening:

Whilst Ivara's one of the better designed Warframes to date, she still has some rather glaring issues which need hammered out. And whilst there's been several threads I have seen on her, many of them seem to miss their mark when discussing what is wrong with her. I created this thread to provide a thorough and detailed discussion, as well as to post my thoughts and to gather recommendations from other players.

General: Ivara lacks impact on the team. She places too many eggs in one basket, with builds using all of her abilities sacrificing defensive and utility mods, or narrow and specific loadouts, and builds with a specialized purpose destroying chances to use her other abilities. The algorithms used in her abilities are complicated and often exponential, which makes it extremely hard to predict how well a given build will function. Many of her abilities are also redundant with each other, making it so that some abilities completely defeat or otherwise overshadow others.


Quiver:


Cloak arrow is almost entire redundant on her kit.

Dashwire arrow is hampered by zipline mechanics.

Noise arrow is almost entirely useless.

Suggestions:

In theory, Quiver is four abilities in one. Offering a vast amount of utility. In practice, this is not the case. Cloak arrow has no clear purpose, for a couple of reasons. First: Ivara herself can remain invisible indefinitely, thanks to Prowl, which also grants her a nice damage boost to headshots. This means there is very little reason to rely on Cloak arrow. Second: It's not particularly useful to allies, either. Generally speaking, such defensive abilities are used to revive downed allies, or prevent them from going down in the first place. But, since Cloak arrow creates a static field of invisibility, and enemies can, and will, shoot at the location one was last seen, you will often be torn to shreds even whilst invisible. Furthermore, since most Warframes already include abilities to revive their allies, this feature is rarely important to take advantage of. While you can provide a moving stealth field by directly hitting allies,this is nearly impossible to do without coordination, as your allies will be moving around. This also needs to be reapplied rather frequently considering the difficulty of doing so, even with maxed duration builds. The result is that Cloak arrow's primary use is to pair it with Prowl to allow you to remain invisible without running Hush on non-silent weapons. And as this is a band-aid fix, and entirely loadout specific, it's clear some changes need to be made.

I suggest that Cloak arrow's field cap is removed, and that its range is increased from 2.5m radius to 4m radius. This will allow Ivara a bit more build flexibility, and allows you more room to move around to avoid gunfire whilst invisible. If an allied Warframe, including Ivara, comes within a static 4m radius of the center of the stealth field within 1 second of its creation, the cloak will attach to them and expire after 50% of the total duration. This allows Ivara to turn invisible without having to sacrifice the fun of parkour, and allows her to affect her allies much more reliably.


Dashwire arrow is an ability used almost entirely for fun, as there is never a need to create a zipline to cross a gap. And that's perfectly fine. But it is often unclear as to if a zipline can even be created, and nothing happens when it fails except wasting energy. In addition, attempting to reload whilst near a zipline can cause you to mount it when you do not intend to (if you have activate and reload enabled in the options menu). And you cannot easily cross between ziplines, as you must first jump off, and then you will hop onto the closest one, which is often the one you were already on. Since ziplines already lock you to a fixed plane of movement, it seems silly that you also move slower than you otherwise would have along the ground. To fix these issues, I suggest a 50% speed boost whilst on a zipline, and ziplines will only be mounted if you are in range and your reticle is within a reasonable fixed distance from it. To fix the issues with ziplines failing, Dashwire arrow pulls Ivara towards the impact site if a zipline cannot be created, and enemies hit will be launched in the opposite direction of the zipline's trajectory.

Noise arrow is supposed to be used to distract enemies and force them to a target location, either to prevent them from finding you, or to gather them for mass murder. The former is pointless, as enemies walk extremely slowly, and Ivara already has Prowl to remain unseen. Since neither can be used on alerted enemies, it is useless on pretty much every mission type outside of Spy. To fix this, I suggest that Noise arrow always affect enemies, regardless of their alert level, and it forces them to run towards the target location with increased speed. This should make both uses of Noise arrow actually purposeful. The only downside is that this might allow the creation of 'loot caves' and camping, but Loki already does this with a non irradiating Radial Disarm, and the community will with or without this ability. (And there's also nothing intrinsically wrong with camping.)

Navigator:

Pointless outside of style kills, counter-synergistic with her other abilities, impossible to control on most weapons,  absurd energy efficiency calculations. Also does not work at all with non-projectile weapons, vastly reduced effectiveness on multishot weapons and high RoF weapons.

Suggestions:

No longer provides invisibilty whilst casting, and can no longer be cast whilst a projectile is in mid flight. Projectile is given bouncing properties against terrain, and has unlimited punch through against enemies. 15m projectile flight speed, rather than varying by weapon. Pressing fire increases speed by 5m, pressing Alt-Fire reduces speed by 5m, down to a minimum of 0m speed. Pressing zoom immediately inverses the direction of travel. The projectile is returned to its usual flight speed upon exiting the ability. Energy cost changed from a dynamic time and speed based drain to a static drain, with each target being hit draining 10*n Energy, where n is the number of targets previously hit. The damage increases similarly with each bounce or enemy hit. Any multishot on the attack is converted into an equivalent base damage modifier on the shot. And, finally, the shot consumes ammo and has its damage increased based upon the weapon's fire rate.


These changes should all be pretty self-explanitory. This allows Navigator to be used on any projectile weapon, regardless of its RoF or any multishot. The energy cost is normalized, making it more clear as to how much it will drain. The punch through changes prevent it from going outside of the map and getting stuck. All of these changes are absolutely necessary, because as it currently stands, it works best with sniper weapons or bows due to benefiting the most from the damage increase and the fact that it does not work well with high fire rate or multishot, but they counter-intuitively have a projectile speed which makes them difficult if not impossible to use it with. This should also make Navigator much more fun to use with her Artemis bow. There is also virtually no reason to control Ivara's Quiver abilities, and my Quiver changes should help remedy that.

Prowl:
This renders Cloak arrow almost entirely pointless, has extremely complicated energy cost, and prevents parkour whilst it is on, but you can barely survive if you turn it off.

Prowl no longer provides invisibility at all. Instead, it silences Ivara and all of her weapons, and grants 30% damage reduction, with each point of damage prevented draining .4 Energy. The energy drain per second is changed to 3, with no additional reduction for melee or movement. Steal time changed to scale more linearly, such that 1% duration is equivalent to .01 seconds off the steal time.


The main reason for these changes is to remove the redundancy Ivara has with the three stealth abilities in her kit. This will still enable her to perform flawless stealth runs without relying upon Cloak arrow, but will enable Cloak arrow to have a defined purpose. This also normalizes the energy drain on Prowl, such that melee is less of a problem, and enables Ivara to gain some purpose out of the incredibly energy drain Prowl has when damaged.

Artemis Bow:

Alt+Fire no longer instantly casts Quiver shots, instead, Ivara will adjust the spread counter-clockwise. Pressing Reload whilst no shot is currently charging will instead instantly fire a Quiver arrow.

This is mostly to fix the oddity that Ivara can create a 45 degree angle shot in one direction, but not in the other, patching up some weird aiming issues. This is honestly a pure QoL suggestion, and hardly worth putting in spoilers.

TL;DR

Quiver generally only useful for silly ziplines and the sleep debuff, and the ziplines are not fluid enough to used in most missions. Navigator is only accessible to a few choice weapons, entirely pointless in most cases, and impractical to use. It also has negative synergy with Artemis Bow, and there's no incentive to use it with Quiver. Prowl's energy cost is ludicrous and discourages parkour, but the incentives to use it are so overwhelming that it overshadows all of her other abilities outside of Artemis Bow.
 

[bubbabenali]

Cloak Arrow useless...

 

Yeah, it only can cloak your teammates and defense targets for a longer time than the other two cloak frames them selfes.

Absolutely useless...

 

And Prowl is one of the best skills in the game, please don't toch it.

[KaeseSchnitte]

The Cloak arrow is far from useless, it is quite the contrary, her most useful ability, even compared to Prowl.

You can use the cloak arrow to conceal both allies and friendly NPCs, which is especially useful in rescue- or sortie defense missions.

It can also be used to fire non-silenced weapons without breaking stealth and it has a better energy efficiency than Prowl.

 

The Dashwire arrow is the skill I have the most fun with and it can be used to create safespots against infested. Only thing it could need is a QoL change that lets Ivara switch between dashwires in range when pressing X, and reload while she is in range of another dashwire by aiming (RMB) and pressing X.

 

The Noise arrow is pretty useless, but it atleast fits her stealth approach.

 

The Sleep arrow is fine as it is.

 

Navigator should be able to lock onto targets, or their weakpoints if those have been marked, to make it easier to hit them, LMB should speed the arrow up, RMB should slow it down and pressing no mouse button should let it fly at normal speed.

 

Prowl is fine as it is.

 

Your suggestion for the Artemis Bow's alt fire is good, but instead of pressing reload for the instant Quiver cast, pressing 1 should simply be instant while Artemis Bow is active

Edited February 10, 2016 by KaeseSchnitte

[tedbearr]

I cloak my low level teammates so they won't die and put up zip lines for my teammates to get to higher grounds.

[Gelkor]

Says has no team utility

Says cloak arrow is redundant

 

 

Try using Cloak Arrow for your team-mates, it's amazing.

 

The ability to set up an invisible sniper nest wherever and whenever you want for your whole team is pretty fantastic IMO.

 

I agree navigator is a little blase, I only use it on solo spy missions to take care of cameras and some guards, never in the heat of battle.

Edited February 10, 2016 by Gelkor

[Marthrym]

Cloak arrows are only redundant with Ivara herself. They are EXTREMELY useful when used on teammates and objectives. I lost count of how many times I saved a buddy just by throwing cloak arrows on the ground for them to use.

I do agree that Noise arrows aren't all that great though, but stealth isn't either in Warframe, so...

And yes, Zipline arrows are clunky to use. They are a Godsend when they work properly when using Prawl, since they alleviate partly the horrendously slow pace at which Ivara can move.

 

I don't use Navigator much, if at all, because it can have too many limitations, and its energy cost is simply ret@rded. It can be powerful and fun though.

 

Prawl is a very "ironic" ability. Without it, Ivara is incredibly vulnerable though nimble and agile, like Loki. With it, her survivability goes through the roof (until cheap disabler-type units show up anyway...), but the mechanical limitations, such as extremely limited speed, and impossiblity to use parkour, something that FINALLY is fun and useful, really hurt Ivara more than anything IMHO. Meanwhile, Loki can move at FULL speed and use parkour, and Energy Siphon still works, allowing him to permanently cloak, while Ivara needs to either use energy pads, get very lucky with RNG (so, never...) or to toggle the ability off and hide in a corner. In a "fast-paced" game, it doesn't make much sense. I get that it's called "prawl", but parkour should be available while prawling at the very least.

Edited February 10, 2016 by Marthrym

[venon23]

The Cloak arrow : make team invisible ---- op  no more coments
The Dashwire arrow: create new aim positions --- if u are playing with snipers bows opticor this is great  or vs infested
The Noise arrow : XP ----- if u are a solo player  using noise arrow and sleep arrou will get u tons of XP my friend  doing quick exterminats
The Sleep arrow ;  nice CC : works for solo and for team play  

 

Navigator: most for solo player use  i will say this this ability is not the best in game but i realy love this when solo playing ( steath//

Prowl: ability every hunter class should have in any game combining  steath with steal  love all love special when u steam energy orbs and keep in steath


the only thing u can change in  ivara is :
The Noise arrow :  make the already alerted enemys look ate that direction for 2 secs  like a mini stun  but since we have sleep for that is not realy needed 
 

Edited February 10, 2016 by venon23

[God_is_a_Cat_Girl]

Says has no team utility

Says cloak arrow is redundant

 

 

Try using Cloak Arrow for your team-mates, it's amazing.

 

The ability to set up an invisible sniper nest wherever and whenever you want for your whole team is pretty fantastic IMO.

 

I agree navigator is a little blase, I only use it on solo spy missions to take care of cameras and some guards, never in the heat of battle.

I was about to point this out.

Also, there is times when the Cloak Arrow is still useful for Ivara herself, despite having Prowl. Some times RNG decides to go, nope, no energy orbs for you, and if you are using Artemis quite a lot while in Prowl, you will get rather low energy levels, so if RNG doesn't help you, you can just pop an energy plate, right? Well, you can, but you won't get any energy because of Prowl, so you need to turn it off, but if you do you will be attacked which you won't want with someone as squishy as Ivara, and on missions like Survival, you don't want to stay hidden through the whole duration of the plate. The solution? Cloak Arrow and deactivate Prowl. You will need 2 or 3 Cloaks, but you will be able to get energy.

 

 

On a team, Cloak is amazing for revivals, and if no one else is close, you can just rush and use the cloak as a faster way to reach them without having to recast Prowl. It's also really good in Rescue missions, you can use on the panels while you and your team hack and then on the Hostage.

Sure it's an ability that is hard to keep on your team mates all the time, but has plenty of uses on a team.

I do agree that Navigator is more about novelty and it's hard to make use of it, but can still help. Some times I use it to place cloaks in places that I have no LoS, so I use Navigator to quickly redirect it. It can be useful for some "through the door" multi kills with arrows.

Sound arrows do need a use for alerted enemies.

[ShortCat]

I understand your view regarding Noise Arrow and Navigator but...

 

[...]

Cloak arrow is almost entire redundant on her kit.

Dashwire arrow is hampered by zipline mechanics.

 

[...]

You must have got an arrow to the knee.

 

Cannot take this thread seriously, sorry.

[xRufus7x]

Sorry, but as many have said, Cloak Arrow is in no way redundant. It is the only power in the game that lets you turn allies invisible without an augment. It is extremely useful for the new defense, rescue missions and revive scenarios. Also pretty much any time you aren't soloing.

 

Dashwire Arrows is a mobility power like switch teleport, ripline and Tailwind. It lets you get places pretty easily and bypass obstacles. It is extremely useful for spy missions or getting to hidden areas if you don't want to waste time with parkour.

 

Noise arrows combos with sleep arrows and Prowl. Attract everyone to an area, put them to sleep, pickpocket them and then do finishers on all of them. ignoring armor and if you have covert lethality guaranteeing a kill at any level. Some powers come into their own when used with other powers and IMO this is a good thing. It forces you to think a little bit on how and when to best use an ability.

 

I will give you that Navigator is a bit hard to steer and a big energy sinc but wouldn't it be better to just fix that than overhaul the whole power.

 

Prowl is fine the way it is. It is IMO the best balanced invisibility power in the game. Invisibility and stealth in this game in general could use to be looked at but that is a different topic. Also it is ridiculously cheap. You can pretty much completely negate its cost. It could use some fixes in terms of random accidental sprinting and parkour but other than that it shouldn't be changed.

 

QOL change for Artemis Bow is OK though.

Edited February 10, 2016 by xRufus7x

[Inarticulate]

The algorithms used in her abilities are complicated and often exponential, which makes it extremely hard to predict how well a given build will function.

 

Please find me one place where Ivara uses an exponential calculation in her abilities.

 

 

Cloak arrow is almost entire redundant on her kit.

 

First off, Cloak arrow is not at all redundant in a squad. Second, Cloak arrow allows Ivara to regenerate energy while remaining cloaked, which you cannot do with Prowl.

 

 

Dashwire arrow is an ability used almost entirely for fun, as there is never a need to create a zipline to cross a gap. And that's perfectly fine. But it is often unclear as to if a zipline can even be created, and nothing happens when it fails except wasting energy. In addition, attempting to reload whilst near a zipline can cause you to mount it when you do not intend to (if you have activate and reload enabled in the options menu). And you cannot easily cross between ziplines, as you must first jump off, and then you will hop onto the closest one, which is often the one you were already on. Since ziplines already lock you to a fixed plane of movement, it seems silly that you also move slower than you otherwise would have along the ground. To fix these issues, I suggest a 50% speed boost whilst on a zipline, and ziplines will only be mounted if you are in range and your reticle is within a reasonable fixed distance from it. To fix the issues with ziplines failing, Dashwire arrow pulls Ivara towards the impact site if a zipline cannot be created, and enemies hit will be launched in the opposite direction of the zipline's trajectory.

 

Dashwire arrow has several significant benefits over parkour. It gives you complete control over your path of motion, allowing you to easily slip through stationary laser grids. It gives you the ability to stop moving in mid-air, allowing you to time your approach through moving laser grids as well as the ability to rain death from high above the battlefield. Unlike wall latch, you can perch up there forever as there is no time limit.

 

Furthermore, Dashwires can also be used by squadmates.

 

 

Noise arrow is almost entirely useless.

 

Noise arrow gets those pesky Combas and Scrambuses that cancel your Prowl to stop zooming through hallways and around corners and stand still in your line of sight so you can pop them in the head. That in itself is useful enough for me to be grateful for its existence.

 

 

Navigator:

Pointless outside of style kills, counter-synergistic with her other abilities, impossible to control on most weapons,  absurd energy efficiency calculations. Also does not work at all with non-projectile weapons, vastly reduced effectiveness on multishot weapons and high RoF weapons.

 

Navigator removes the maximum range limitation on the Sonicor (and any other projectile with a timer, e.g. grenades). My most common use of Navigator is to snipe the camera from around the corner on the Corpus spy vault with the U-shaped hallway covered by fast sweeping laser gates (where it's very difficult to Prowl through due to the gates' speed). It also let me snipe Combas and Scrambuses with my Dread from around corners before I discovered how great Noise arrow was.

 

I don't find the projectile speed to be a problem. It's really no different than flying the Death Star trench run in Rogue Squadron with your foils closed.

 

 

Prowl:

 

Prowl does not need changes. It could perhaps use an augment, but the base ability is fine as is.

 

 

Artemis Bow:

Alt+Fire no longer instantly casts Quiver shots, instead, Ivara will adjust the spread counter-clockwise. Pressing Reload whilst no shot is currently charging will instead instantly fire a Quiver arrow.

This is mostly to fix the oddity that Ivara can create a 45 degree angle shot in one direction, but not in the other, patching up some weird aiming issues. This is honestly a pure QoL suggestion, and hardly worth putting in spoilers.

 

Instant Quiver shots is the best part of Artemis Bow. It is not worth removing that function to allow counterclockwise fan rotation. Being able to spam the crap out of Sleep arrows from rescue to extraction (and letting the hostage clean everything up with a Sonicor) without Prowl active is priceless.

Edited February 10, 2016 by Inarticulate

[torint_man]

@Inarticulate Her navigator ability has an exponential growth in energy cost per second. http://warframe.wikia.com/wiki/Navigator 

[TheLexiConArtist]

Please find me one place where Ivara uses an exponential calculation in her abilities.

 

Prowl does not need changes. It could perhaps use an augment, but the base ability is fine as is.

 

Navigator exponentially drains more energy the longer you have a projectile out. Which is not often because it's moderately clunky and could benefit from some QOL and tweaks. (I'd like to see alt-fire toggle a slower speed than 'neutral' to give us three speeds for easier tight navigation; non-exponential energy drain because you can't move or be EV'd energy while you're using it anyway, and possibly have negative duration increase multiplier gain to bring more build-synergy with Quiver and Prowl, albeit at the cost of some statistical self-synergy with Transient Fort and Fleeting Ex.)

 

Prowl has too many invisible side effects in my opinion. Stealing is affected by negative power strength (no idea if positive strength improves anything). Four different calculations on energy drain (standing, moving, melee, damaged) of which only one is readable in the ability list so we can see how (if at all) they are affected by duration/efficiency stats.

Also, Arc Traps and indirect damage (dots, Venom Eximus aura) cause energy to disappear way too quickly. Walk in front of an Arc Trap without running Flow and you lose all your energy well before the Trap self-destructs, and they detect you in stealth just fine. That's just frustrating. I'd much prefer direct damage only and/or a cap on hits-per-second that can cause the additional energy drain. Or remove it entirely as unneeded complexity.

 

 

OP;

I can agree with Noise Arrows being near-useless (even for stealth runs since they often cause breaking of multiplier through 'suspicion' level alerting the affected enemies) but your other assertations and definitely most of your suggestions are weak at best. I'm one of the most high supporting/utility members in most pub squads I join up with. Sortie Medic Ivara keeps most squads functioning instead of failing all over the place.

 

Cloak autoattaching to allies sounds useful, except when you want to actually keep the field in place, which is.. most of the time. I don't have much of an issue with being shot in my cloak field (though it helps that I have 250% range and the freedom to move a bit) except when allies dance in and out at the edges, which is just as much a problem for Prowl and other invis frames when squadmates try to deliberately or accidentally use your invisible frame as meatshield.

 

Dashwires.. can be finicky, and the fact DoubleBulletJumpRoll is faster than traversing across them limits their actual use, but having an extra platform almost wherever you want has its uses. QOL improvements for making the lines at best, avoiding massive wastes of energy from failed attempts.

 

Noise arrow.. do anything, I only use it by accident.

 

Sleep Arrow is excellent, and running with a Covert Lethality Dagger makes for a great surgical strike capability for removing any-level, augmented-defenses enemies from your path. As long as they're finisher-enabled and they 'sleep' into the relevant state. It's overshadowed a bit by Global Blind Mirage but so is almost everything these days.

 

Navigator needs self-stealth in flight because you lost control of your player vulnerability (frame hitbox). The stealth lets you not die every time you cast Navigator because a single enemy happened to spawn nearby and come to teabag you while you can't see them.

 

Prowl could use improvements as I mentioned in the above reply to the quoted poster, but your suggestion only makes sense in the context of your questionable desire to make Cloak bubbles constantly attach to anything in the general vicinity. I don't know how many times I get put into an awkward spot because I accidentally attached the bubble to something other than the floor. Keep Prowl's functionality, but ease up on some of the 500 restrictions involved at the moment.

 

Artemis Bow's instant Quiver shots are valuable to me, if it had quick-melee enabled that's pretty much all I'd use. My overextended build for maximum Cloaking and Sleeping makes the actual AB shots lacklustre, but being able to more smoothly execute the Sleep and Covert-Lethality-Finish combo would be fine for me. Making its charge something else entirely as has been suggested many times elsewhere would be okay, or to just make the horizontal/vertical two separate states without that weird x-degree angle shot between them. Charged y/n == horizontal y/n.

Edited February 10, 2016 by EDYinnit

[Maicael]

I would only want a few changes made to Ivara:

 

1) Quiver's arrows have a display that circles your reticle when switching between arrows to make it easier to see which one you're switching to without looking off to the bottom right side away from your main combat visual area. Think placing the gear wheel centered at your reticle, but a hollowed center and only 4 (but larger) options that form the circle. Once an arrow is selected it will fade away and possibly leave a small icon of your active arrow above the reticle.

 

2) For her Artemis bow I would completely do away with the vertical spread. Have a horizontal spread that becomes narrower as it charges. A fully charged shot could create one very powerful arrow with little to no arrow drop, higher flight speed, and increased punchthrough. Similar charge functionality as the Ballistica (multiple arrows to 1 more poweful shot).

 

I think I'd also like the energy drain changes OP mentioned to Navigator. Not sure how bouncing on all terrain and unlimited enemy punchthrough would work on projectiles/explosives like Tonkor, Quanta Cube, and Sonicor though. I already don't like Sonicor's projectiles bouncing off surfaces when I'm controlling it. Also, I think Ivara needs to have that invisibility while Navigator is active given how long she could be vulnerable otherwise. I actually didn't know Navigator activated invisibility anyway until yesterday. I always activated Prowl myself before using Navigator.

Edited February 10, 2016 by Maicael

[God_is_a_Cat_Girl]

Sorry, but as many have said, Cloak Arrow is in no way redundant. It is the only power in the game that lets you turn allies invisible without an augment. It is extremely useful for the new defense, rescue missions and revive scenarios. Also pretty much any time you aren't soloing.

 

Dashwire Arrows is a mobility power like switch teleport, ripline and Tailwind. It lets you get places pretty easily and bypass obstacles. It is extremely useful for spy missions or getting to hidden areas if you don't want to waste time with parkour.

 

Noise arrows combos with sleep arrows and Prowl. Attract everyone to an area, put them to sleep, pickpocket them and then do finishers on all of them. ignoring armor and if you have covert lethality guaranteeing a kill at any level. Some powers come into their own when used with other powers and IMO this is a good thing. It forces you to think a little bit on how and when to best use an ability.

 

I will give you that Navigator is a bit hard to steer and a big energy sinc but wouldn't it be better to just fix that than overhaul the whole power.

 

Prowl is fine the way it is. It is IMO the best balanced invisibility power in the game. Invisibility and stealth in this game in general could use to be looked at but that is a different topic. Also it is ridiculously cheap. You can pretty much completely negate its cost. It could use some fixes in terms of random accidental sprinting and parkour but other than that it shouldn't be changed.

 

QOL change for Artemis Bow is OK though.

 

About Dashwire, it's actually pretty useful for missions like Interception, not just to travel to point to point without having to deal with obstacles, but Ivara can move faster while using Prowl while in a wire than on the ground. This helps a lot when you don't want to be seen but can't reach team mates or points fast enough by rolling.

 

Prowl is a good example of a balanced yet ridiculously good power, but also a good example why comparing powers can be silly, like when people say "but X Warframe does the same, except better", yeah, not quite. You could say Loki's better because he can go fast, true, he can go fast, but he can't loot like enemies, he does get a melee multiplier but doesn't get headshot bonus. The goal of the power is the same, be invisible, the bonuses aren't, and that's where comparison is silly, because you also have to play for the bonuses as they change their gameplay, not just for the main part of the power. The entire set also has to be considered, so there's not much of a point in comparing in such way. (This isn't really related to anything you said though, except the balanced part.)

However, it would be great if they did a QOL change to Prowl, and make it so casting Prowl while sprinting makes it so it will automatically turn off the sprint toggle. Despite that even the Sprint toggle still needs some QOL changes, this is something that really annoys me, because things like aiming toggle it off (during aiming it's fine, that's how aiming works, but it should turn itself on when you stop aiming, because it kills the whole point of having toggle if you are still pressing it all the time), but Prowl doesn't, so you end up losing energy and it can get really confusing. You have toggle sprint on, you Prowl, it gets cancelled by sprinting, then if you aim before using prowl again, it turns the toggle off and since Prowl got cancelled by sprinting earlier, your reaction will be to go cancel it, except aiming did that already, so instead you turn it on, use Prowl and get Prowl cancelled, again.

[taiiat]

while Dashwires can be a bit finicky to use sometimes (and i guess being able to rotate Artemis Bow the other way would be useful), your other 'problems' sound like user error.

and the Abilities are already balanced in context of each other. you suggest removing most of the things that balance the Abilities to each other though.

 

all of Ivara's tools have a lot of applications, you just seem to have not discovered most of them yet.

Edited February 10, 2016 by taiiat

[(PSN)Smooth81Criminal]

Opening:

Whilst Ivara's one of the better designed Warframes to date, she still has some rather glaring issues which need hammered out. And whilst there's been several threads I have seen on her, many of them seem to miss their mark when discussing what is wrong with her. I created this thread to provide a thorough and detailed discussion, as well as to post my thoughts and to gather recommendations from other players.

General: Ivara lacks impact on the team. She places too many eggs in one basket, with builds using all of her abilities sacrificing defensive and utility mods, or narrow and specific loadouts, and builds with a specialized purpose destroying chances to use her other abilities. The algorithms used in her abilities are complicated and often exponential, which makes it extremely hard to predict how well a given build will function. Many of her abilities are also redundant with each other, making it so that some abilities completely defeat or otherwise overshadow others.

Quiver:

Cloak arrow is almost entire redundant on her kit.

Dashwire arrow is hampered by zipline mechanics.

Noise arrow is almost entirely useless.

Suggestions:

In theory, Quiver is four abilities in one. Offering a vast amount of utility. In practice, this is not the case. Cloak arrow has no clear purpose, for a couple of reasons. First: Ivara herself can remain invisible indefinitely, thanks to Prowl, which also grants her a nice damage boost to headshots. This means there is very little reason to rely on Cloak arrow. Second: It's not particularly useful to allies, either. Generally speaking, such defensive abilities are used to revive downed allies, or prevent them from going down in the first place. But, since Cloak arrow creates a static field of invisibility, and enemies can, and will, shoot at the location one was last seen, you will often be torn to shreds even whilst invisible. Furthermore, since most Warframes already include abilities to revive their allies, this feature is rarely important to take advantage of. While you can provide a moving stealth field by directly hitting allies,this is nearly impossible to do without coordination, as your allies will be moving around. This also needs to be reapplied rather frequently considering the difficulty of doing so, even with maxed duration builds. The result is that Cloak arrow's primary use is to pair it with Prowl to allow you to remain invisible without running Hush on non-silent weapons. And as this is a band-aid fix, and entirely loadout specific, it's clear some changes need to be made.

I suggest that Cloak arrow's field cap is removed, and that its range is increased from 2.5m radius to 4m radius. This will allow Ivara a bit more build flexibility, and allows you more room to move around to avoid gunfire whilst invisible. If an allied Warframe, including Ivara, comes within a static 4m radius of the center of the stealth field within 1 second of its creation, the cloak will attach to them and expire after 50% of the total duration. This allows Ivara to turn invisible without having to sacrifice the fun of parkour, and allows her to affect her allies much more reliably.

Dashwire arrow is an ability used almost entirely for fun, as there is never a need to create a zipline to cross a gap. And that's perfectly fine. But it is often unclear as to if a zipline can even be created, and nothing happens when it fails except wasting energy. In addition, attempting to reload whilst near a zipline can cause you to mount it when you do not intend to (if you have activate and reload enabled in the options menu). And you cannot easily cross between ziplines, as you must first jump off, and then you will hop onto the closest one, which is often the one you were already on. Since ziplines already lock you to a fixed plane of movement, it seems silly that you also move slower than you otherwise would have along the ground. To fix these issues, I suggest a 50% speed boost whilst on a zipline, and ziplines will only be mounted if you are in range and your reticle is within a reasonable fixed distance from it. To fix the issues with ziplines failing, Dashwire arrow pulls Ivara towards the impact site if a zipline cannot be created, and enemies hit will be launched in the opposite direction of the zipline's trajectory.

Noise arrow is supposed to be used to distract enemies and force them to a target location, either to prevent them from finding you, or to gather them for mass murder. The former is pointless, as enemies walk extremely slowly, and Ivara already has Prowl to remain unseen. Since neither can be used on alerted enemies, it is useless on pretty much every mission type outside of Spy. To fix this, I suggest that Noise arrow always affect enemies, regardless of their alert level, and it forces them to run towards the target location with increased speed. This should make both uses of Noise arrow actually purposeful. The only downside is that this might allow the creation of 'loot caves' and camping, but Loki already does this with a non irradiating Radial Disarm, and the community will with or without this ability. (And there's also nothing intrinsically wrong with camping.)

Navigator:

Pointless outside of style kills, counter-synergistic with her other abilities, impossible to control on most weapons,  absurd energy efficiency calculations. Also does not work at all with non-projectile weapons, vastly reduced effectiveness on multishot weapons and high RoF weapons.

Suggestions:

No longer provides invisibilty whilst casting, and can no longer be cast whilst a projectile is in mid flight. Projectile is given bouncing properties against terrain, and has unlimited punch through against enemies. 15m projectile flight speed, rather than varying by weapon. Pressing fire increases speed by 5m, pressing Alt-Fire reduces speed by 5m, down to a minimum of 0m speed. Pressing zoom immediately inverses the direction of travel. The projectile is returned to its usual flight speed upon exiting the ability. Energy cost changed from a dynamic time and speed based drain to a static drain, with each target being hit draining 10*n Energy, where n is the number of targets previously hit. The damage increases similarly with each bounce or enemy hit. Any multishot on the attack is converted into an equivalent base damage modifier on the shot. And, finally, the shot consumes ammo and has its damage increased based upon the weapon's fire rate.

These changes should all be pretty self-explanitory. This allows Navigator to be used on any projectile weapon, regardless of its RoF or any multishot. The energy cost is normalized, making it more clear as to how much it will drain. The punch through changes prevent it from going outside of the map and getting stuck. All of these changes are absolutely necessary, because as it currently stands, it works best with sniper weapons or bows due to benefiting the most from the damage increase and the fact that it does not work well with high fire rate or multishot, but they counter-intuitively have a projectile speed which makes them difficult if not impossible to use it with. This should also make Navigator much more fun to use with her Artemis bow. There is also virtually no reason to control Ivara's Quiver abilities, and my Quiver changes should help remedy that.

Prowl:

This renders Cloak arrow almost entirely pointless, has extremely complicated energy cost, and prevents parkour whilst it is on, but you can barely survive if you turn it off.

Prowl no longer provides invisibility at all. Instead, it silences Ivara and all of her weapons, and grants 30% damage reduction, with each point of damage prevented draining .4 Energy. The energy drain per second is changed to 3, with no additional reduction for melee or movement. Steal time changed to scale more linearly, such that 1% duration is equivalent to .01 seconds off the steal time.

The main reason for these changes is to remove the redundancy Ivara has with the three stealth abilities in her kit. This will still enable her to perform flawless stealth runs without relying upon Cloak arrow, but will enable Cloak arrow to have a defined purpose. This also normalizes the energy drain on Prowl, such that melee is less of a problem, and enables Ivara to gain some purpose out of the incredibly energy drain Prowl has when damaged.

Artemis Bow:

Alt+Fire no longer instantly casts Quiver shots, instead, Ivara will adjust the spread counter-clockwise. Pressing Reload whilst no shot is currently charging will instead instantly fire a Quiver arrow.

This is mostly to fix the oddity that Ivara can create a 45 degree angle shot in one direction, but not in the other, patching up some weird aiming issues. This is honestly a pure QoL suggestion, and hardly worth putting in spoilers.

TL;DR

Quiver generally only useful for silly ziplines and the sleep debuff, and the ziplines are not fluid enough to used in most missions. Navigator is only accessible to a few choice weapons, entirely pointless in most cases, and impractical to use. It also has negative synergy with Artemis Bow, and there's no incentive to use it with Quiver. Prowl's energy cost is ludicrous and discourages parkour, but the incentives to use it are so overwhelming that it overshadows all of her other abilities outside of Artemis Bow.

 

I am really sorry but you are either not building the frame right, or you have absolutely no idea how to use Ivara.

 

Quiver:

Cloak arrow is meant to help your team. It is incredibly useful to keep defense targets invisible as well as allies. Also, it is incredibly useful for any ally that is downed since it has the capacity to cloak an entire squad to revive them.

 

Sleep Arrow i think speaks for itself. Very effective crowd control in tight spaces

 

Dashwire is good for hiding above enemies to snip them down but i think could be more useful with the help of an augment

 

Noise Arrow is good for drawing enemies to one location. In terms of stealth you can draw a great number of enemies in one spot then use sleep arrow after its duration is done for massive experience.

 

Navigator:

I actually really appreciate this ability and I use it all the time. Granted it can only be used with certain weapons, but remember that Ivara is a projectile frame. I cant even tell you how useful it is to be fighting on an interception, find an ally has been downed outside of direct line of sight while youre taking your tower and be able to cloak them for another ally to revive them.

 

Prowl:

This is perfectly balanced. The reason you cant parkour with this ability is because it virtually never ends. The energy drain on this ability is not bad at all, and if it is for you then you are building it wrong.

 

Artemis Bow:

This skill is incredible. Nuff said.

 

If you arent able to use quiver effectively while in Artimus bow then you are doing something wrong. I use it all the time and I am quite effective with crowd control and cloaking allies. If your energy drain is too high then you are not modding correctly. My opinion is dont change her at all. She is one of the best frames I have ever used.

[IonCross]

I think Ivara is perfect. You might want to explore more builds with her. 

[Knightmare047]

Cloak Arrow useless...

 

Yeah, it only can cloak your teammates and defense targets for a longer time than the other two cloak frames them selfes.

Absolutely useless...

 

And Prowl is one of the best skills in the game, please don't toch it.

Cloak arrows are also useful with Ivara herself if she isn't carrying a silenced weapon. Good for marking a spot where you can sit in and shoot at enemies while they're confused of where you are.

[Darkmoone1]

I think Ivara is perfect. You might want to explore more builds with her. 

Agreed. The only ability I had issues with was noise arrow. Other than that I found a use for every single ability which made her an effective, yet vulnerable frame. 

[izzatuw]

I stopped at Cloak arrow is bad.

I'm loving her to pieces.

Her 1st is stupidly good for reviving since there will be absolutely no aggro and multiple player revive is much easier.

Shoot the arrows on teammates, it's quite good and 22 seconds of invis? How is that bad?

Sleep arrow is really good CC for a first. A first.

It's useful in intercepts when you need to stop someone from hacking your signal. Trust me this has saved me a ton.

Granted outside of solo play sound arrow is kinda useless

[Maicael]

I stopped at Cloak arrow is bad.

I'm loving her to pieces.

Her 1st is stupidly good for reviving since there will be absolutely no aggro and multiple player revive is much easier.

Shoot the arrows on teammates, it's quite good and 22 seconds of invis? How is that bad?

Sleep arrow is really good CC for a first. A first.

It's useful in intercepts when you need to stop someone from hacking your signal. Trust me this has saved me a ton.

Granted outside of solo play sound arrow is kinda useless

There have been so many times as Loki that I'll be invisible and go down while reviving because somebody else came over and started drawing fire.

[TheLexiConArtist]

There have been so many times as Loki that I'll be invisible and go down while reviving because somebody else came over and started drawing fire.

 

It's not just that. The downed player still has a valid target for enemies to shoot at if they're using a Sentinel, which is probably responsible for more failed revivals than additional, more visible allies coming to 'help' is.

[Kaidinah]

Only change I want is allowing Ivara to pull up ledges and over railings without ending prowl. Oh, and having prowl toggle your sprint off.

[TheLexiConArtist]

All this gripe about toggled sprint reminds me that sprinting even exists, when I ask myself, who even sprints in the age of Parkour 2.0? Outside of Volt Speed or deliberately stacking sprint mods, there's rarely any faster movement than properly executing bullet-double-jump-roll chains.

 

I suppose that's the point of why everyone is using toggled sprint now. It just feels like an inconvenient button to press (although that could partially be down to my keyboard ergonomics), much less hold, but I don't really seem to be losing much. Even along a flat plane, slide-roll-slide-roll keeps up the brisk pace. Playstyle, I suppose.